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Much as Nintendo's Brain Age spawned a pile of imitators on Nintendo DS, Wii Fit has taken the exercise game from niche oddity to full-fledged genre.

So far, EA Sports Active leads the pack of copycats, delivering a wide variety of exercises and moving 1.8 million units since its U.S. and European launches in May.

I spent several weeks playing Electronic Arts' game, which came out in Japan this week, after largely abandoning Wii Fit. (I gave Nintendo's game a similarly rigorous trial earlier this year.) While the Balance Board-equipped Wii Fit has many good points, it takes too long to work up a sweat when playing: After every exercise, you are booted back to the main menu to select another. Repeating the same exercises gets boring, too.

EA promised that its game would vary routines every day and give you a 20-minute workout in 20 minutes, not an hour. And it does. EA Sports Active is much easier to work into my daily routine, since I never feel like it's wasting my time. It delivers more of what I want out of a workout, making it the better choice for me. That said, EA Sports Active is not nearly as polished as Nintendo's game.

EA Sports Active doesn't require the Balance Board controller that comes with Wii Fit, although you can use it in some exercises if you have one. It comes with its own set of equipment, pictured right: a resistance band and a leg strap.

The elastic resistance band is used in lieu of weights for upper-body workouts; you stand on it and pull up on the rubber band when you're doing biceps curls, shoulder raises, etc. The leg strap is for lower-body workouts — you insert the Wii's Nunchuk controller attachment into the strap so the game knows where your leg is moving.

Every time you turn it on, EA Sports Active creates a different workout for you, stringing together 20 to 30 minutes' worth of exercises. While you can create custom workouts, the ones generated by the software are balanced, switching back and forth between different body parts so as not to overwork anything in a single session.

The game's greatest strength is that it moves rapidly from exercise to exercise, giving you enough time to get your equipment in place but always being ready to begin when you are. Instructional videos, featuring the blue-shirted fit person above, play before you try any new exercise. These, too, load instantaneously.

Other little touches add to the smooth experience. You see the full list of recommended exercises before you begin, and you can remove any you don't want to do that day. (After an unsuccessful attempt at not falling during "jump lunges," I took them out of my rotation.) If you want further guidance, the game's 30 Day Challenge mode will tell you what days to exercise and what days to rest.

These features make EA Sports Active exactly the game that I eventually wished Wii Fit had been: More concentrated on giving you an efficient workout than on slow-paced weigh-ins, balance tests and mini-games. I'll definitely keep using EA Sports Active. Only thing is, it's got its own problems, botching a lot of simple things that Wii Fit got right.

EA Sports Active's weak point is that it knows a lot less about what you're doing, and gives you less feedback, than Wii Fit. Yes, Sports Active has many times more exercises than Wii Fit, but since most of these only use the standard Wiimote (no MotionPlus support), all they do is measure short bursts of linear motion and rotation.

In many exercises, you can be performing the correct movements, but the game isn't measuring them — it's looking for a certain hand position, which sometimes is entirely unrelated to the exercise. For instance, when doing bent-over rows, if your hand doesn't rotate from pointing at the floor to parallel with it — even if you're pulling your arms up exactly where they need to be — the game doesn't know what you're doing.

Thus, I often run into instances where the game doesn't recognize my movements, forcing me to make adjustments to my hand positions. The problem here is that EA Sports Active uses the same feedback, which is to say no feedback at all, for two totally different states:

"You're in the correct position, please hold still until I say to move again," and

"You're in the totally wrong position, please adjust yourself."

In many cases, I find myself fidgeting around, worried that I am doing something wrong, when in fact the game just wants me to hold that position. Compare this to Wii Fit, which gives you two types of constant feedback when you're holding a position. Also, EA Sports Active occasionally drops its audio cues, which is not helpful when you're listening rather than keeping an eye on the screen.

Finally, it's surprising that a game from a company with an entire division devoted to licensing awesome soundtracks for its sports games uses cheesy, synthesized music instead of licensed tracks.

With updates to both Wii Fit and EA Sports Active coming later this year, there's still lots of room for the fledgling exercise genre to bulk up and refine its gameplay muscles. EA Sports Active has its issues, but it's a major step in the right direction.

WIRED Works you out in less time and with more intensity than Wii Fit.